How to Choose The Right Shade For Your Dental Crown

If your crown doesn’t match other teeth in terms of its color, then your newly restored smile isn’t going to live up to your expectations. Rather than a natural looking smile, all people will notice is a crown that stands out for all the wrong reasons.

Dental crowns pay an important role in dentistry whether it’s to add strength and support to a damaged tooth or to cap a newly installed dental implant. As such, dental crown colors need to be carefully chosen in order to achieve the best aesthetics possible, particularly when matching a front tooth crown. Porcelain is one of the most popular materials for dental crowns since it has translucent properties similar to teeth enamel and once it’s been colored to match your natural teeth no-one should know that you’ve even got a dental crown.

Shade matching in dentistry – how to choose the right shade for you

Your dental implant crown should match the color of your other teeth so that it looks totally natural as if it’s always been there. Other factors to consider are your skin tone, hair color, and even the color of your eyes.

Did you know that natural teeth aren’t just one color?

In fact they’re made up of a variety of shades as illustrated in the traditional VitaPan dental crown color chart which most dentists used back in the 1980’s. These were arranged in 4 main categories, A,B, C, and D with each category containing different shades, numbered from 1-4, with 1 being the lightest.

In fact, when porcelain veneers were first introduced in 1985 and the public became more cosmetically aware, most people requested Al teeth. Then by 2000 this was replaced with a new favorite – B1.

What is the whitest shade of teeth?

Once teeth whitening/bleaching became part of mainstream dentistry, the whitest shade often exceeded that of the whitest VitaPan shade and consequently both dentists and patients demanded whiter porcelain shades be introduced to correspond with the teeth whitening results that were being achieved. As a result the B shades were repaced with BL1, BL2, BL3, and BL4 with BL standing for ‘bleaching’. If you’re planning a Hollywood Smile then BL1 is the lightest shade you can choose.

What do dentists suggest?

Natural teeth are actually darker in color than most people imagine and as a rule, unless you’re undergoing a complete tooth makeover, you won’t go far wrong if you choose a shade for your crown that is 2-3 shades lighter than your natural color.

Often dentists recommend a patient to have a teeth whitening treatment for their natural teeth before deciding on a color for their crown. This is because crowns are very difficult to lighten or darken once they’ve been colored whereas it’s far easier to match a new crown to teeth that have just been whitened.

At Chesterfield Dentistry we’re happy to spend as long as you like deciding on the color for your crowns. We want you to be happy with your smile! Why not give us a call on (314) 469 6429 to find out how we can bring your lovely smile back again with our dental crowns and dental implants.